GabChat

Inspiration

People usually do tasks and collaborate to achieve great goals, those can be as little to organize a small party, or large as to build a transatlantic, the key to effective collaboration is great communication, a platform that enables a smooth communication between office users can effectively increment productivity in the short and long term.

What it does

GabChat is basically a chat and activity stream where people can discuss, share ideas, collaborating effectively with other team members.

How we built it

We have a backend application running from azure and written in node.js, that platform made possible real time communication between the users of the application that are in that moment editing or working in a document. The client is an office add-in that consumes the Microsoft graph api in order to retrieve information like the user profile, and contact information for example, the client is written in angular.js with jquery and bootstrap, also using the office javascript api libraries.

Challenges we ran into

It was not easy as we thought, probably the mayor problem we ran into was that there was conflicting documentation about how to to a number of things using azure and the office api, various documents outdated and documentation was not existent at all in a few cases

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We certainly have a better understanding of the angular+office365+node stack, and a number of interesting projects and libraries we used to integrate those platforms.

What we learned

A lot of node and office itself, the possibilities to leverage the application field of the office 365 api is very promising. Also a lot about working as a team and a better understanding of tools that can enhance personal and team productivity.

What's next for GabChat

We plan to continue to offer the service free, so we can get utilization metrics and evaluate if our idea has some value for the current target market.